Fly.io, Sevalla and Railway win when workloads truly stop; UpCloud leads the always-on field at $1.75/GB
Asked (summary):
Find per-GB RAM pricing for Render, Sliplane, UpCloud, Railway (discounted fairly, since it is usage-only), Fly.io, DigitalOcean Droplets, DigitalOcean App Platform, Northflank, Heroku, Nodion and Sevalla — plus similar providers. Produce a clean ranked overview table, show CPU and disk, and note how VPS size changes RAM pricing.
Prices researched 31 Oct 2026 across all 11 requested products plus three comparable alternatives (Hetzner, Cloudzy, Hostinger), from 14 independent source hosts. Values are USD per GB of RAM for a full compute bundle — CPU, and sometimes disk, are included, so this is bundle economics, not a marginal RAM price. EUR converted at 1 EUR = 1.1401 USD.
Fair-use ranking at 25% active time
Full bar = always-on $/GB for the representative plan; dark segment = effective $/GB at 25% activity. Only Fly.io, Sevalla and Railway genuinely stop charging when idle, so only they get the discount. Hover a bar for plan details.
VPS, always-on
PaaS, always-on
Usage-stoppable PaaS
Fixed uptime pool
Does a bigger plan buy cheaper RAM
Smallest vs largest observed plan for each provider, $/GB of RAM (log scale). A line sloping down to the right means volume gets cheaper. Endpoints can be distorted by very large RAM plans, different CPU classes, promos and extraction outliers — treat slopes, not exact values, as the signal.
Hetzner is the always-on outlier at about $0.61/GB on its 32 GB CX53 — but the figure comes from an archived pricing page and needs a live-price check.
web.archive.orgRailway's fair-use number is the $5 Hobby minimum: 1 GB + 0.5 vCPU costs $20/month always-on ($10/GB-mo RAM + $20/vCPU-mo), and at 25% active it lands exactly on the $5 of included usage.
docs.railway.comHeroku Eco looks mid-pack at $9.77/GB, but it is a flat $5 pool of 1,000 shared dyno hours with an ephemeral filesystem — not linearly comparable to per-second compute billing.
heroku.comSize helps most at UpCloud (−45% per GB from smallest to largest observed) and DigitalOcean Droplets (−23%), while Fly.io's sampled started-machine examples get 93% more expensive per GB at the large end.
upcloud.com
Overview: all 14 products, ranked
Requested products ranked by effective $/GB at 25% active time; Hetzner, Hostinger and Cloudzy follow as unranked additional leads (promotional or weakly sourced).
| # | Provider | Type | Representative plan | $/mo | RAM | CPU | Disk | Always-on $/GB | 25% active $/GB | Billing note | Size effect | Source |
|---|
Method: 14 provider/product summary rows researched 2026-10-31 (17 raw rows; one blank-provider and one malformed Railway extraction row excluded, three DigitalOcean Droplet rows merged). "$/GB" = full monthly bundle price ÷ included RAM, so CPU and sometimes disk are bundled in. The 25%-active discount is applied only where compute billing genuinely stops when idle (Fly.io stopped Machines, Railway sleeping services, Sevalla scale-to-zero); Railway is floored at its $5 Hobby minimum. Railway, Fly.io and Sevalla fair-use figures were recomputed from official rates to replace malformed aggregates. EUR at 1.1401 USD. Worst-case observed ratios and per-size plan lists were cut for space.